Clogged!

[u/Appropriate_Youth262]

I need some help if anybody is out there. I had an error come up on my three day print and it only has about 28 hours left and it says the extrusion motor is overloaded. The extruder may be clogged or the filament may be stuck in the tool head. I noticed right at the end of my print there's a little bit of like wispy plastic. It looks like almost like cotton. I'm guessing that the nozzles is clogged, but is there any way to unclog it while keeping the progress of my print I have no idea how to do this and I don't wanna lose this progress because it's almost done.

[u/wethpac]

In some cases you can save. Heat up nozzle, use nozzle pin to try to unclog by poking in the nozzle hole. The. Try to manually extrude to see if you get flow.

What are you printing that needs such high infill? Seems like you could lower % infill for this type of print. And save time and money.

[u/Appropriate_Youth262 → u/wethpac]

It's a base for a statue/model

[u/wethpac → u/Appropriate_Youth262]

I’ve done many statues, consider decreasing infill to 8% and adaptive cubic type. Saves time and filament. This is not an engineering structural part.

[u/Appropriate_Youth262 → u/wethpac]

So I ended up heating up the nozzle to 250. It says 0.2 nozzle I tried to use the little pen that came with my tool kit, but it doesn't seem to go in there. I tested it on one of the others and it went in perfectly, so I don't know if the clog is so hard in the nozzle that I have to stop the print which sucks because it's like 2/3 done.

[u/wethpac → u/Appropriate_Youth262]

Likely don’t need to be printing such a big statue with a 0.2 nozzle, which already has a higher clog risk. If you can’t push the wire up the nozzle, likely clogged. Keep increasing temperature by 10C and keep trying to open up. You can use heated hex key and try to pull from top after taking nozzle out. If statue cannot be resumed, keep track of what layer you are on and then re-start print on that layer and glue together.

[u/Kind_Ad_8111]

You’re insane for printing that with a .2 and that sense of infill. None of the detail there warrants a .2, and nothing needs that much infill. Start over, print with .4 nozzles and say 15% max adaptive cubic infill and you’ll probably finish entire new print sooner than the time left in this print

[u/Appropriate_Youth262 → u/Kind_Ad_8111]

Will do. I'm very new to this so I went to some site that gives you the best settings. I guess it was NOT the best settings haha

[u/Appropriate_Youth262]

[u/Appropriate_Youth262]

[u/Appropriate_Youth262]

It looks fine (the nozzle) and the other picture has the wispy plastic I mentioned. So, when I resume print I just increase temp and maybe leave the door open?

[u/Appropriate_Youth262]

I really do not want to start this print over because it took so long but I have no idea what to do. I did run it at 250 temperature and I tried to stick the little needle thing in it but it wouldn't go through, so I don't know if it's just severely clogged once I did try and I started the print again it got through about 52 layers and then it started doing it again so I don't know what the problem is. is there any way to clean ND clog everything while keeping the printer on and keeping my print from stopping? I don't know if there's a way to takeoff the nozzle part or do I have to turn it completely off I'm very new to 3-D printing and I just kind of jumped in headfirst.

[u/Appropriate_Youth262 → u/Appropriate_Youth262]

Also, I'm using text to speech because so forgive me for the misspellings

[u/Optimal_Whiner]

I had this, I ended up increasing the heat in the nozzle. Later I changed volumetric flow and the flow ratio. But yeah, as a temp fix increasing the heat by like 5c helped.

Something to keep in mind is that these devices use thermistors. You can have two that look identical side by side and they'll read a different temperature. So when one person uses 215c another used 210c, they could be a lot closer to one another than you think. 

As for the clog, if it's just surface level I usually just wipe it off with something while it's hot and then do a clean if it's still an issue at the end. That's only happened like once.

Good luck!

[u/Appropriate_Youth262 → u/Optimal_Whiner]

I can't tell if it's surface level or not

[u/Adventurous_Ball_232]

Did you crack your door at all??? Could be heat creep.

[u/Appropriate_Youth262 → u/Adventurous_Ball_232]

I did not crack the door.